Morton, Frederic The Witching Ship
Set aboard the fictitious Dutch “cruise liner” SYNGDAM during a May 1940 trans-Atlantic crossing. The ship is filled with refugees and American citizens fleeing Europe, and the atmosphere turns tense when Hitler invades the Netherlands while the ship is in mid-Atlantic. At his best, Morton captures the social “feel” of an extended ship trip, with its coalescing and dissolving social fabric:
“The commonweals into which all these friendships had blossomed — you would never have guessed they were only two days old. By the second evening of the trip thy attaied compactness, finality, weathered endurance. Together they formed the SYNGDAM’s social routine which, no sooner invented, seemed to have been laid down for all time.”--p. 51.
The SYNGDAM herself appears to have been modelled after a Holland-America Line vessel, quite possibly the NIEUW AMSTERDAM of 1938.